Atlantic Aviation: Training Room

Corporate Training Room AV System

The Facility: With their main corporate headuarters located in Plano, Texas, Atlantic Aviation provides a wide range of aviation services and a dedicated concierge service for general aviation aircraft owners and pilots across the United States. In May of 2012, they officially moved into their new home office location in west Plano, Texas.

The Challenge: This Dallas-area conference room and corporate training room project consisted of the design and installation of 3 executive board rooms, simple audio visual system integrations for the CEO, CFO, and directors' various offices, as well as an interactive and advanced training room audio video system. The training room system needed to be cutting edge, and it needed to be able to incorporate several video input sources and several video displays. It also needed to be very user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing, with a simple yet intuitive av control system.

Our Solution: We began by gutting the training room of all prior audio video cabling, and we ran completely new 18/2 speaker cable for the commercial audio system and unshielded cat5e cable for the new video distribution system. All cabling was ran back to a fully enclosed 18u AV equipment rack, which has a sleek glass door and dual top-mounted cooling fans, and houses the training room's various av components.

For the audio system, we installed a Bogen 70v commercial mixer/amplifier to power 6 in-ceiling 70v commercial audio speakers. Having installed many commercial audio and conference room systems across Dallas and Fort Worth, we've found that these in-ceiling loudspeakers are the best choice for a 70v system, providing superior sound and music quality at an affordable price point. The Bogen mixer/amplifier also has eight modular input bays, which allows us to custom-design the AV system with the perfect combination of mono, stereo, and microphone input sources. So no matter what audio source inputs we decide to use in our conference room designs, the mixer can handle the project.

For the training room's video distribution system, we chose the 8x5 HDMI over Cat5e video matrix switcher, from Atlona Technologies. This particular matrix switcher was designed to switch HDMI signals of up to 8 AV sources, and output them in any combination over twisted pair to up to 5 remote displays. This switcher allows any or all of the 8 available inputs to be simultaneously switched to any or all of the 5 available outputs, and it will support high definition video in multiple resolutions up to 1080p or 1920x1200 and 3D. The 8 video sources that were chosen for this training room system, are a blu-ray player, an Apple TV, a Verizon Fios HD cable box, a permanent desktop PC with dual HDMI outputs, 2 wireless video transmitters, and an HDMI wall plate for laptop integration. These 8 video sources are then available, in any combination, on the main 147" in-ceiling projector screen, or the 2 Sharp 70" LED TV's on either side of the screen.

Control of the entire conference room's AV system rests confidently with an in-wall color touchscreen keypad from Remote Technologies, Inc. This intuitive and elegant keypad controls the power of the projector and the TV's, it raises and lowers the projector screen, it controls volume on the amp, and it controls the AV source components. This in-wall touchscreen controller is also 100% customizable, from the background layout to the actual buttons and graphics. Not only does this keypad drive the training room's entire audio video system, but we were able to customize the design of the keypad's pages to fit the look and feel of Atlantic Aviation and their website.